3 Quarks Daily Advertising

Please Subscribe to 3QD

If you would like to make a one time donation in any amount, please do so by clicking the "Pay Now" button below. You may use any credit or debit card and do NOT need to join Paypal.

The editors of 3QD put in hundreds of hours of effort each month into finding the daily links and poem, putting out the Monday Magazine, administering the Quark Prizes, arranging the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, and doing the massive amount of behind-the-scenes work which goes into running the site.

If you value what we do, please help us to pay our editors very modest salaries for their time and cover our other costs by subscribing above.

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our loyal readers. Thank you!

3QD on Facebook

3QD on Twitter

3QD by RSS Feed

3QD by Daily Email

Recent Comments

Miscellany

Design and Photo Credits

The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

Friday, June 17, 2005

Dining on Iain Sinclair

'Literary critic James Wood called him the "demented magus of the sentence"; John Walsh suspected him of genius, writing: "He can outgun virtually any writer in England."'

Why then, if this Guardianprofile/interview rings true, don't more Americans know who Iain Sinclair is? His new novel, Dining on Stones, isn't yet available in the States, although some of his previous titles can be found here and there. The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries describes Sinclair's style:

'...Hemingwayesque, sometimes sinuously poetic sentences, verb-free zones, clipped gags. On the first page of the new novel, for example, we read: "Pass sixty, sixty-five, and you can't sustain an erection beyond eight and a half minutes. So I read. Is that a promise? Eight and half minutes, of the right intensity, sounds good. Novelists have managed books on less."'

I don't think I have read better contemporary nonfiction than Sinclair's books Rodinsky's Room and Lights Out for the Territory, both about the topographical ghosts of London. One of the reasons for Sinclair's American obscurity is his London mania: shorthand references to minor celebrities and thumbnail sketches of East End gangland history which probably require (and deserve) a whole apparatus of annotations.